The invention relates to a fantasy sports team league (FSTL) where multiple teams are drafted to be on the FSTL player's “roster” for the day, week, or season.
This FSTL is team-centered, as opposed to leagues that focus on the performance of individual players. Since many sports leagues have many teams (e.g. college football currently has 128 in the FBS alone, Division I college basketball has 350 teams, etc.), and because the players in leagues like college football and college basketball are so numerous (FBS college football has around 15,000 players while Division I college basketball has over 5,000), and since teams can change drastically from year-to-year, it is often too difficult for the average FSTL player to come to well-reasoned predictions about individual players—especially those playing for teams outside of the FSTL player's sphere of interest (e.g. his/her local team, conference preference, alma mater, etc.). Therefore, instead of haphazardly selecting individual players, FSTL players can utilize team research to build a fantasy roster of entire teams to compete against the rosters of opposing FSTL players.
In an exemplary embodiment, a method of administering a fantasy sports team league includes the steps of (a) establishing a player salary cap; (b) conducting a draft by enabling players to select teams or team characteristics from a list of game matchups, each team or team characteristic being assigned a cost and a point value based on each team's chance of winning, wherein the players are required to keep a total cost of the selected teams below the player salary cap; and (c) after the game matchups have been played, awarding the point value to the players for each winning team or team characteristic selected by each of the players.
Step (a) may be practiced based on a number of team or team characteristic offerings and the cost of each team or team characteristic. In step (b), the cost and point value for each team or characteristic may be dependent on the team's or characteristic's chance of winning. In this context, the method may also include determining the team's chance of winning by using moneyline odds at a specific time before the draft, removing a vigorish added in the moneylines to arrive at a result, and converting the result to a percentage. The team characteristics may comprise at least one of a team's offense and a team's defense. Steps (a)-(c) may be practiced weekly over an entire season, and the method may further include the step of determining the fantasy sports team league winner based on points accumulated over the entire season. The team characteristics may include a number of wins over an entire season, where the cost and point value for each team may be determined according to a number of games each team may be projected to win.
In another exemplary embodiment, a computer system for administering a fantasy sports team league includes at least one user computer running a computer program that requests and processes information according to registration information input by a player; and a system server running a server program, where the at least one user computer and the system server are interconnected by a computer network. The system server administers the fantasy sports team league by (a) establishing a player salary cap, (b) in conjunction with the at least one user computer, conducting a draft by enabling players to select teams or team characteristics from a list of game matchups, each team or team characteristic being assigned a cost and a point value based on each team's chance of winning, where the players are required to keep a total cost of the selected teams below the player salary cap, and (c) after the game matchups have been played, the system server awarding the point value to the players for each winning team or team characteristic selected by each of the players.
In another exemplary embodiment, a computer program is embodied on a computer-readable medium for administering the fantasy sports team league.